Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old-fashioned sort that gives one the choice between tea and cocoa.  It was something of an occasion, I suspected.  The minister was there, the Reverend Mr. Doddridge, who would have made, in appearance at least, a perfect Puritan divine in a steeple hat and a tippet.  Only—­he was no longer the leader of the community; and even in his grace he had the air of deferring to the man who provided the bounties of which we were about to partake rather than to the Almighty.  Young George was there, Mr. Hutchins’s nephew, who was daily becoming more and more of a factor in the management of the mills, and had built the house of yellow brick that stood out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses’ mansions, and marked a transition.  I thought him rather a yellow-brick gentleman himself for his assumption of cosmopolitan manners.  His wife was a pretty, discontented little woman who plainly deplored her environment, longed for larger fields of conquest:  George, she said, must remain where he was, for the present at least,—­Uncle Ezra depended on him; but Elkington was a prosy place, and Mrs. George gave the impression that she did not belong here.  They went to the city on occasions; both cities.  And when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs. Hambleton Durrett—­whom she thought so lovely!—­I knew that she had taken Nancy as an ideal:  Nancy, the social leader of what was to Mrs. George a metropolis.

Presently the talk became general among the men, the subject being the campaign, and I the authority, bombarded with questions I strove to answer judicially.  What was the situation in this county and in that? the national situation?  George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment of the demagogues, national and state, who were hurting business in order to obtain political power.  The Reverend Mr. Doddridge assented, deploring the poverty that the local people had brought on themselves by heeding the advice of agitators; and Mrs. Hutchins, who spent much of her time in charity work, agreed with the minister when he declared that the trouble was largely due to a decline in Christian belief.  Ezra Hutchins, too, nodded at this.

“Take that man Krebs, for example,” the minister went on, stimulated by this encouragement, “he’s an atheist, pure and simple.”  A sympathetic shudder went around the table at the word.  George alone smiled.  “Old Krebs was a free-thinker; I used to get my glasses of him.  He was at least a conscientious man, a good workman, which is more than can be said for the son.  Young Krebs has talent, and if only he had devoted himself to the honest practice of law, instead of stirring up dissatisfaction among these people, he would be a successful man to-day.”

Mr. Hutchins explained that I was at college with Krebs.

“These people must like him,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have sent him to the legislature.”

“Well, a good many of them do like him,” the minister admitted.  “You see, he actually lives among them.  They believe his socialistic doctrines because he’s a friend of theirs.”